3 Generations On The Farm

Photographic Odyssey Of The Good Times And Bad

April 25, 1986|By Mary T. Schmich.

Archie Lieberman could not have predicted that the story would change on him this way. It is like a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that twists perversely at its end into a grim piece by Eugene O`Neill.

He can`t walk out on it, though, can`t flip the channel or rewrite the script. In the 32 years that he has been photographing the farm families of Jo Daviess County, the story has become his life, its characters have become his friends.

He has preserved these people as allegorical figures representing strength, goodness and harmony, all that is noble about the land, hard work and family. Now he must preserve them as well in moments of despair and defeat. The farmer`s world has changed, and with it his pictures. Sometimes it`s almost more than he can stand.

``I never knew why it was so important for me to do this, but I kept being called back here,`` he says one chilly afternoon, driving over narrow gravel roads past hills and hollows, cornfields and thickets of red elm, aspen, walnut and oak. An unexpected April snow has dusted the fresh spring green of the pastures, and a silver silo rises occasionally against the chalky sky. ``Chicago is my mother--you can`t choose your mother--but Jo Daviess County is my wife.``

Jo Daviess County is in the northwest corner of the state, where Illinois meets Iowa and Wisconsin on the Mississippi River. The county has one stoplight, no interstate and until the recent official christening, most roads were known simply by family names.

Evelyn and Meldon Grube answer the door. He hands them the photographs, testaments to their weary wisdom, and asks what they think. For a long, awkward moment they are silent.

Evelyn Grube adjusts her glasses and politely studies one of the photos. It is of a small, gentle, careworn housewife standing in the pale light of a farmhouse window.

Her husband glances at the second photo, of a husky farmer in a tractor cap who is fastening his tired jacket with a safety pin where the zipper has failed. He glances wordlessly away from the picture, his broad Germanic face giving no clue to how he feels about this black-and-white version of himself, his wife, his life.

The two pictures are part of a three-photographer show, ``Farm Families,`` that opens Saturday at the Art Institute. Because Lieberman is their friend and neighbor and they live by a code that says neighbors should help each other do their work, the Grubes have exposed their lives to his camera. In doing so, they have allowed the world to inspect the lines in their faces, their daughter`s marriage, their meals; to peer into their small living and dining room with its low ceiling and scuffed wood floor, the toaster and TV on the hutch, the souvenir plates on the walls.

In the gray light, they sit at the wooden dining table, scarred by thousands of meals. It has been cleared except for a candle nestled in a wreath of wax fruit.

When Lieberman asks if they`ll be coming to the show`s opening and offers to book them a room, they shake their heads. Chicago is too big, too busy, too hostile, too far. Besides, they have corn to get into the ground, and planting has never been an act of such desperate hope.

They begin to talk about the farm and almost soundlessly Meldon Grube begins to cry.

He disappears briefly to a back bedroom, the bedroom where he was born 61 years ago. His grandfather was born in this house. So was his mother. He and his wife raised nine children here. He is about to lose it.

He returns to the table, composed, and explains how he got into this mess. In the 1970s, like thousands of farmers, he borrowed and expanded, encouraged by the federal government. Then in 1981, a depression hit farmers all over the country.

Money that he borrowed when the interest rate was 8 percent he has been paying back at varying rates as high as 17 percent. When the government revalued his 400 acres, his farm`s worth decreased in a bureaucratic instant by $200,000. Last year he paid $24,000 in interest, while he, his wife and their three sons who are still at home lived on $10,000. Now he is 90 days overdue on his loan payments, which gives the government the right to foreclose.